The French conceptual artist and agent provocateur Sophie
Calle has arranged for a private investigator to follow her, shadowed and
photographed a man traveling through Venice, impersonated a stripper, invited a
series of strangers to sleep in her bed so she could observe them, and
interviewed people listed in a lost address book she found, and published her
findings in a newspaper. Calle's bravado, voyeurism, and penchant for violating
boundaries and standards of appropriateness have brought celebrity and
notoriety to a 40-year career characterized by risk, exhibitionism, intrusion,
role-playing, a fondness for games, and a predilection for the wild side. "I
thought you'd be in jail," she recalls her lawyer saying to her
when she ran into him on a Paris street, gleefully adding that she'd
"love to have a trial."

"Missing," now on view at Fort Mason, is the
artist's largest exhibition in the U.S. to date. Curated by Evelyne Jouanno,
founding director of Ars Citizen, it brings together four projects created
since the 1980s that revolve around her preoccupation with loss and absence.
The show, installed in three buildings on the waterfront site, could have been
called "Inside the Mind of Sophie Calle." It's her ideas and unorthodox,
some might say outrageous methods that are the main event. By her own
admission, she's not an especially good photographer, but she is an adroit
storyteller with a keen ear for the absurd that manifests in cool, sober,
understated prose that can be mordantly funny. Describing her work doesn't
adequately translate the experience of encountering it. There's no one quite
like her.

While Ft. Mason's scenic beauty provides a cinematic backdrop
for Calle's experiential art-form, the buildings don't add as much as one might
think in the way of atmospherics. In fact, the tour de force that is "Take
Care of Yourself," the exhibition's most successful and sure-to-be-talked-about
section, is mounted in the conventional, albeit large, high-ceilinged Gallery
308. For the project, which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Calle
contacted 107 women from different professions and invited them to perform,
read aloud, comment on, analyze and otherwise interpret a break-up email she
received from a former lover. Among the respondents: actresses, singers and
dancers, a grammarian, a physicist, an 18th-century historian, a philosopher, a
geisha, a mathematician, several lawyers, a clown with a bulbous nose and
floppy hat, and a markswoman who shot the letter with three bullets from a
distance of 15 meters. She didn't miss. Through videos, photographs and text,
they deconstruct the self-justifying correspondence in inventive and
deliciously amusing ways, forming a chorus of female solidarity, contempt,
empathy and scathing humor. "It usually takes me 10 years to [formulate]
an idea for a project; this one took me three days," Calle revealed during
a recent talk.

The unedited responses, laid out on tables and stacked on
top of each other on the walls, include a woman reading the letter to a naked
female blow-up doll seated across the table from her; a film of a melodramatic
Punch & Judy-style puppet show; and an analysis from a criminologist, who
delivers the following conclusion: "He's an authentic manipulator,
perverse, psychologically dangerous and/or a great writer. To be avoided at all
costs."

But the prize goes to the sarcastic psychiatrist who notates
her disdain next to the letter writer's offending sentences with comments like,
"We don't care!," "The poor dear," and, "Hypocrite."
When he laments that he would have liked things to have turned out differently,
she retorts: "Yes, of course, blame it on Mom, the priest, the president,
Madonna, Don Juan, the riots in the suburbs, and who knows what else."

A cluster of videos plays soundlessly on monitors
surrounding a central screen with audio. It's frustrating if you're
waiting for particular renditions to cycle up. In my case: Jeanne Moreau,
Laurie Anderson, and French coloratura Natalie Dessay, belting out her version
on a grand staircase.

The piece generates lively debate, its universal appeal
evident in the chatter and raucous buzz the evening I visited. After all, who
among us hasn't received a kiss-off from an unworthy, self-centered jerk?
class=apple-converted-space> Calle says she was so excited about the
project, "I was afraid he would come back." The unnamed "he"
in the equation learned about it a year after it premiered but didn't
interfere, though he has since penned an 1,800-page rejoinder for a book coming
out in September. Evidently hell hath no word limit like a writer scorned
.

Though Calle's oeuvre may seem a forerunner of the oversharing
on social media, hers is a controlled, methodically staged, faux intimacy. She
presents her pieces with clinical detachment, similar to a police report, which
doesn't mean the origins of the material aren't deeply personal. "Rachel
Monique," for example, is about the 2006 death of her mother. After
learning she had three months to live, Calle installed a camera at the
foot of her mother's deathbed to document the exact moment life fled her
body. The resulting 11-minute video, "Couldn't Capture Death," is
shown behind the altar in the Ft. Mason chapel, which appears set up for a
funeral except for unusual features like the head and long, graceful neck of a
stuffed giraffe, protruding from a side wall and looking down on the
proceedings with doleful eyes. Framed and posted around the space are tart
entries from Monique's diaries, such as, "I didn't give you much and you
returned the compliment"; Calle's account of transporting Monique's
diamond ring to an iceberg at the North Pole; and a memory of a morning they
spent together when her mother abruptly stopped in front of a hotel and told
her to shut up. "Silence," she said. "This is where I lost my
virginity."

Unlike her gregarious mother, Calle's late father, a doctor,
Pop Art collector and very private man, will not be addressed overtly in her
art. "When he died, I was lost," she says. "His were the first
eyes to judge my work. I thought without his eyes, I should stop being an
artist." Fortunately there's no danger of that happening any time soon. Her
next project: men hunting for women.